ACK Controls, the company behind the newly announcedAmiga hardware, has held an IRC session where they answered questions and provided more details concerning the upcoming hardware. According to ACK, the promised hardware will arrive with OS4 despite the legalbattle going on between Amiga Inc. and Hyperion. On the high-spec machine (USD 1500), they said: "It's faster than anything Apple ever produced on the PowerPC side of things." Which is interesting, to say the least. The transcript containts many more details, and the Amiga community is discussing the matter as well.

SATA hard drives are more expensive. SATA optical drives are more expensive and there are fewer choices.

SATA prices for both drives and optical are about the same as IDE these days. There is a slight price premium for optical of about $3CDN. ACKCONTROLS did say "It didn't make sense to use IDE. Would add extra chip" I don't know if this would offset the $3 difference for the SATA DVDRW drive